Tegra 4i is not going to be 60mm2 unless it is die shrunk or on some process that has far superior logic density. Get hi-res die shots of T4 and T4i and put them through image comparison. The layouts are almost identical!

Note how much smaller the GPU ALU's are on the scaled down T4i die from the nvidia marketing slide.Reply

I see this as a desperate act by Nvidia. Their T4 design lacks a baseband, and uses quite a lot of power for a smartphone chip.So they use the old A9 arch, which cant be competitive with the A15 archs, even with a higher speed bump. And no "hundreds of design wins" , eh Jen-Hsun-Husang ?I guess OEM's got tired of youReply

Maybe those sale numbers weren't very high because people were disappointed with the Tegra2 performance in all those tablets? Just because it is in a lot of them (courtesy of Google using it as the dev platform for Honeycomb) doesn't mean it was actually a good SoC.Tegra2 sucked. It came too late and when it came it was underwhelming performance/power wise. Tegra3 was okay though. But it's been around for long enough.I'll hold off commenting on T4(i) until I see Anand's review of it. Very interested in it though.Reply

The real issue is: what is nVidia trying to be?There is one market (call it the Intel market) where you are shipping expensive, but clearly best of breed devices. There is another market (call it the VIA market) where you are selling devices that do work, and are really cheap. Both are viable businesses. But VIA doesn't pretend to be competing with Intel --- it doesn't market that way, it doesn't design that way, it doesn't price that way.

Then you have the third model (call it the AMD model) where you can't decide what you are. You market, design, and price (as much as you can) against Intel, but you can't deliver. THIS is not a good place to be. And it seems to be the place where nVidia is today.Reply

do not put in your blind fanboyism here. There is more to it than mere A9 vs A15 blah blah. You really want a 5hr talktime phone with A15? Well sure you can have it. Newer HTC phones are rumored to have 2300mAh with qualcomm's processor. Why? That architecture's perf is not even close to A15.

Quad-core A15 (T4) is mainly for tablets and high-end superphones. This T4i seems to be for general smartphone category. It has great perf/watt which is what matters for a smartphone. Performance-wise it will obviously not be as good as A15. But it is about what you want for a smartphone.

When someone comes out with A15 chip, certain people crib about battery power. When they come out with a low-power chip you crib about performance. Man, it is hard to satisfy one who wants it ALL in one chip.Reply

Thats the thing. All these processors are good enough for a smartphone. You cannot identify a .3millisecond lag while scrolling down a webpage.

OTOH, users did not really have great options either to try out, as most of the phones were S4 due to LTE reasons (in USA). Design wins were due to LTE. The biggies like GS3, OneX did not have Snapdragon in them outside USA.

S4 is highly optimized for benchmarks. Even in that they fail against A15 miserably. Performance-wise A15 is much better than Krait. You have proofs online, if you want to search for. But well, a lot of them fall for marketing gimmicks such as benchmarks and are "satisfied", like you said.

FYI: perf of Krait is in between A9 and A15, more closer to A9. Perf of Apple A6 is in between A9 and A15, but more closer to A15.

Tegra4i is A9-R4. You can check the link in my previous comment. Its all facts and not philosophy. So Tegra4i could potentially have the perf of Krait (or better) but in a much smaller chip with lesser power. Sometimes people should put down their ego and just appreciate good engineering.

What we see here (tegra4i) is a phone chip. If you tend to disagree that this chip has good enough performance required for a smartphone, while is going to be a battery-saver, I don't know what else I can say.Reply

Are we sure about that?With the higher ipc and clocks, we should be looking at around a 40% increase per core (that should put it close to an A15 running at 1.6). Their power draw might even be a bit lower than that of an A15 since the A15 seems about double that of the A9.Reply

I don't think it is a desparate act. Right now it seems that only qualcomm is the only game in town when it comes to a single chip SOC solution and Nvidia is trying to crack into that market. The high end models would probably carry the Qualcomm chipset while the mid tier phones will carry the nvidia one.Reply